SOURCE: Kaye, Elizabeth. “A Passage through Middlescence.” Los Angeles Times Book Review (23 July 1995): 13.

In the following review, Kaye asserts that although Sheehy offers some interesting insights in New Passages, several of her ideas are unoriginal and poorly written.

I cannot say it surprised me to read in Gail Sheehy's New Passages that the syndrome she termed “Catch-30 for Couples” in Passages, her best-selling book published in 1970, could now be termed “Catch-40 for Couples.” Sheehy has long been established, after all, as a writer with a facility for what some might describe as beaming light on a murky path and what others may view as taking old clichés and making new clichés of them.

Further, New Passages is predicated on the notion that life has changed considerably since the appearance of the old Passages, a fortuitous circumstance for Sheehy, not to mention for us. “People today” she...